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The American media often presents people from Britain as overly stuffy and conservative, to the point of being uptight and unable to cope with breaks from the way they believe things should be.

Of course, one need only watch modern British television, with its abundance of drama and open-mindedness, to see this trope averted. Not only averted, but in many cases, inverted. However, rationality in the face of adversityis a British virtue. The British sense of humour can also form a stumbling block; in many cases, it tends to work on ironic understatement and dry wit that can easily fly under the radar of people who aren't used to it.

This trope also applies more specifically to upper-class British people, and middle-class people who aspire to be like them. Lower-class Brits will often be rowdy and bawdy - unless their Nonconformist or Evangelical religious beliefs are being played up.

It's worth noting that there's something of a continuum of National Stereotypes involved with this trope. Americans themselves may be portrayed as the stuffy ones when contrasted with anyone from the Mediterranean or the Middle East. For the British, the "comically uptight" stereotype often goes to the Germans, and once upon a time to the Japanese.

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Examples

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In an advert for the Aiwa Mini System shown in New Zealand in 1995, some rock music is played so loud that it travels halfway round the globe... and prompts a disgruntled English gent to remark, "Ahem! Could whoever it is over there in New Zealand, with the Aiwa Mini System, please turn it down a bit? Thank you."

A commercial for Red Robin features an American couple trying to get a rise out of a stone-faced British Royal Guard.

In a meta-example, the most complained about adverts on US TV have all either been grossly misleading and/or offensive. The most complained about advert on British TV was one for Kentucky Fried Chicken, which featured people talking with their mouths full. Bloody Americans, coming over here, polluting British children with their mouth-full-talking ways!

The character representing England in Axis Powers Hetalia is not necessarily "stuffy" as such, but does display a disapproving and often despairing attitude towards his compatriots, with his neurosis usually triggered in reaction to their behavior. He is otherwise a knowledgeable and amiable chap, if a bitirritable. He does at least try to be a gentleman. It just doesn't work out with his real personality. However, the English dub plays this straight, making the character speak with a stereotypical (RP) English accent (apparently), and he sounds much "stuffier'' there.

Carla in the dub of Fairy Tail has a light accent, reflecting her initial personality.

Art

A fine example of Britons poking fun at this image are the greeting cards made by Donald McGill. They were traditionally sold at beach resorts and featured saucy Double Entendre images and jokes.

Comic Books

Batman's butler Alfred often comes across as a Stuffy Brit, which carries over to most adaptations. The most prominent exception is Batman Begins, where he's given a British army sergeant's accent and backstory. In the comics he also had plenty of backstory: at one point it was that he was an SOE agent/saboteur for England during WWII and had a kid with a beautiful French Resistance named Mademoiselle Marie, but that's been dropped because of timeline considerations. (Humorously, one of the standard portrayals of Alfred was on Batman: The Animated Series - where, except for the first few episodes, he was voiced by an American actor!)

From Adventures In The Rifle Brigade, Capt. Darcy is the typical stuffy British officer type, or at least tries to keep the front up. Best example, he does his best to maintain a stiff upper lip among all his men, while the German halftrack in which they are currently riding is raped by an elephant.

The whole premise of What a Girl Wants: Amanda Bynes vs. British Stuffiness. Incidentally, the above page quote from this film was reportedly ad-libbed by Eileen Atkins. Ironically, Bynes was known for her squeaky clean and chaste image. In an interview, she also admitted that Britain is "not as different as we portray it in the film."

The film Wild Child is looking like a rip-off of What A Girl Wants in which the British Stuffiness will be even worse.

Jarvis, the impeccably polite AI that runs everything important in Tony Stark's house in Iron Man sometimes lapses into this.

In the James Bond film canon, Q is a rather cranky version of this trope. Also, the original M was quite gruff, with only a few flashes of paternal affection toward Bond. Bond, of course, is the exact opposite of this trope.

Well, Bond is sexually uninhibited, at least, but in the movies he never cries or shows much emotion, and in the novels he's much less openly emotional than the Black or American characters (although he does weep on two occasions).

While not stuffy, he is definitely less openly emotional... compare him to American counterparts such as Jack Bauer.

The Queen is basically about British Reserve encountering the modern age.

An American Werewolf in London has more than a little of this. Especially the impossible-to-insult policeman. The xenophobic villagers are also worth recognising, as is their 'opening-up' via humour (if we decide to like you, we'll make fun of you).

In Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, when Death comes to a dinner party to take away the guests, the British host firmly but calmly reprimands him for his bad manners. When the Grim Reaper reveals they were all killed by tainted salmon, all the host's wife can say is "I'm most dreadfully embarrassed".

While it is an American/British co-production, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day has an air of this about it. The eponymous Miss Pettigrew is an uptight, strait-laced Vicar's daughter, and her counterpoint is the wild American Delysia Lafosse. Most of the other British characters are also fairly flighty, though, and Delysia's free-spirited nature isn't entirely admirable. It was averted in the original novel, where Delysia is English.

In Mel Brooks' Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Jonathan Harker attempts to fend off the lustful advances of new vampire Lucy by politely reminding her, "We're British." However, his reserve crumbles utterly when she presents her breasts (which, she reminds him, are also British).

John from Christmas in Connecticut has the plummy RP accent of Reginald Gardiner, is fussy and uptight in an Ambiguously Gay way, and says things like "I say!" when catching his fiancee in the arms of another man.

The Carry On franchise made a fortune dwelling on this stereotype. When the series reach the 1960s, the cast always got caught into embarrassing sexual situations and double entendres, and because it was on the big screen they could get away with far more Ms. Fanservice nudity than on TV. While many British people laughed at this Self-Deprecation comedy, others were embarrassed by the success of this franchise. Many who basically were the kind of people satirized in these comedies.

''The Circle: Elizabeth describes her husband Arnold, an English lord, as "an old woman." He tries to talk her out of leaving him by saying "You might force me to do something rashand I'd dislike that frightfully."

Vernon Dursley is a prime example, via his portrayal of a member of the aspiring middle classes. Thus feeding the American media, but not a product of it. Vernon may be stuffy and concerned with appearance, but he is very much not reserved, and is implied to be telling raunchy jokes in mixed company with his 12-year old son around.

The second film also adds Robert Hardy as Cornelius Fudge, who works him much stuffier than in the book.

Percy is pretty stuffy as well, as evidenced by the fact he calls his parents "Mother and Father" rather than "Mum and Dad" like his siblings. Of course, this has more to do with him being a pompous, ambitious prefect with No Sense of Humor who has his eyes set on becoming Minister for Magic rather than his nationality.

Aziraphale from Good Omens has cultivated a strong aura of this, in spite of being an angel and therefore not British at all. (Fanon likes to state that he was always like this, and that he actually introduced the concept to Earth.) However, Aziraphale has trouble living up to the above-it-all aspects of this stereotype, and he tends to come off as extremely sensitive and worried on top of being extremely British. As well as... er... something else.

Directly referenced in the American Girls book "Happy Birthday, Molly!" when Molly's mother explains to her why the English girl who is visiting is so quiet. Her explanation is that "English children are taught to be reserved—very polite and quiet." Since the girl was one of the Blitz Evacuees watching London be bombed may have something to do with her quietness. Molly's mother also invokes the stereotype at first, and one of Molly's friends also expects Emily to curtsey because that's what English girls do, according to her stereotypes.

The Aubrey-Maturin novels are great subverters of this trope. In the Georgian Age (the 18th century through the early 19th century), open displays of emotion were considered much more acceptable in English culture than during the later Victorian and Edwardian eras. In fact, Stephen Maturin gently chides his friend Jack Aubrey on several occasions for being overly emotional, and in his private thoughts and diary entries notes emotionalism as being a weakness of the English psychological makeup. Stiff Upper Lip, though, is in full play, as demonstrated during many sea battle scenes.

In Horatio Hornblower, Mr Bush is perplexed when Lady Barbara notes that he's fond of Captain Hornblower because it's hard to fit such a sentimental notion into his fundamentally British way of thinking (although she's quite right).

Sea Catch in "The White Seal" conveys an astounding upper-class stuffiness despite being a seal.

In Emma, when John Knightley and his wife visit Hartfield, he and his brother John greet with a handshake and a simple "how d'ye do" which Austen notes as "the classic English mode" of almost entirely concealing brotherly affection that would have them drop everything the instant the other needed help.

Live Action TV

Our Miss Brooks: The very British public school headmaster in "Hello, Mr. Chips." While quintessentially British, he's a youngish man who gets around fairly well with everyone at Madison. Mr. Conklin, interesting enough, was expecting a much stricter man and had even dictated that Miss Brooks (and the rest of the faculty) wear funereal black so as not to hurt his sensibilities.

The A&E version of The Lost World had both Robert Hardy and James Fox, as feuding professors of paleontology, which causes the VHS copy to smell like tea and tweed and pipe tobacco. However, it starred the somewhat more jovial Bob Hoskins as a sort of Adventurer Paleontologist, along with some dinosaurs, which lightened the mood somewhat.

The Ted & Ralph sketches from The Fast Show are a British-made example, combining country-squire Ralph's man-crush on Ted, his gamekeeper, with some genuinely moving British stuffiness. Such as when Ralph tries to ask Ted out: "Do you... like Tina Turner, Ted?"... "I wouldn't know about that sir". Best of all, the scene where Ralph must tell Ted that his wife has died, without breaking the rules of the absurd pub-game, because that would embarrass Ted.

Inverted in Frasier, where it was the two main American characters who were stuffy and elitist, while most of the British characters who appeared were cheerfully working-class (albeit with a host of mismatched regional accents). Though, in an interesting example of how entrenched the British/stuffy association is in the US, people have been known to refer to Frasier and Niles's posh inflections as "British accents." This is likely because the accents of the Anglophonic nations (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA) sound more English the more upper-class a character is. All "posh accents" of the Anglosphere sound more similar to original English RP.

Fawlty Towers' Basil Fawlty, played mainly for comedic effect as he tries to be this but his constant run of bad luck leads to less desirable results, especially in "the Wedding Party" episode. "You know something? You disgust me. I know what people like you get up to, and I think it's disgusting!" In another episode he suspects a young couple of sharing the same room together despite his rules on keeping unmarried people separate. He even tries to spy on them to catch them red handed.

It usually blows this away, especially hiring such energetic and expressive actors as David Tennant and Catherine Tate, but they did play with it in "The Idiot's Lantern." Lampshaded in "The Unicorn and the Wasp." When Donna wonders about how everyone involved is going to deal with the weirdness of the episode, the Doctor says, "They'll never speak of it again, they're too British."

William Hartnell, who played the original incarnation of the Doctor, said in the serial 'The Daleks' Master Plan' "I am a citizen of the universe and a gentleman to boot" which was to represent 19th century British ideals.

Often lampshaded by Max on The Nanny when he uses this as an excuse for why he is unable to show his feelings.He and his entire family are perfect examples of this, with the exception of his brother Nigel, who has been shown to be very passionate and exuberant, although he was considered the black sheep of the family, and supposed to be the exception that proves the rule.

One place that this seems to be inverted, however, is talk shows. On American shows like Letterman or Leno, the host is usually behind a big desk, and everything sounds a little formal (barring certain circumstances like the guest and host being longtime friends, or the guest just being a little wacky, then things will usually go a little off the rails.) On British shows like Graham Norton, the set is made up like someone's living room, there's usually drinks available, and everything seems a little more informal and chatty.

Horrible Histories frequently plays this for laughs, although the show's goofy energy, as far from stuffy as possible, always shines through.

Lane Pryce, and just about every other British character on Mad Men - with the exception of Jaguar representative Edwin. Lane tries to approach his fellow ex-pat as a kindred spirit, but fails. It turns out he's just as debauched as Roger or Pete, and his idea of a fun night involves visiting a brothel. This backfires spectacularly when Edwin's wife finds out and Lane is the first to hear of the deal being called off.

Roger: Why would he say anything?!

Lane: BECAUSE HE WAS CAUGHT WITH CHEWING GUM ON HIS PUBIS!

Star Trek: Enterprise had tactical officer Malcolm Reed, who was noticeably more reserved than his mostly American crew mates. The contrast was particularly noticeable when he became good friends with the very emotive Trip Tucker.

Doc Martin: Martin, is almost a caricature of the emotionally repressed Brit. From his stiff as a board posture, to his constant inability to handle emotions (well, postive emotions anyway, he has a better handle on the negative ones).

Death in Paradise has Detective Inspector Richard Poole, who sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the residents of fictional Caribbean island Saint Marie. He is even considered stuffy by the vast majority of the other British characters, who downplay, subvert or even avert this trope more often than they play it straight.

Are You Being Served?: Captain Peacock walks and talks this trope. He is extremely old fashioned and easily embarrassed about all the things going on in the clothing store. He is also very prone of accidentally touching a female model, a bra or a pair of knickers and only realizing it when it's already too late.

The Benny Hill Show: One of the most famous displays of British people poking fun at this image were the sketches of Benny Hill. He was always chasing behind or chasing from cute young women and getting involved in embarrassing situations where people suddenly were exposed in their underwear.

Peep Show: Mark Corrigan is this to a T, often getting himself into embarrassing situations because he just won't say how he feels.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver frequently mentions this, mostly in segments about the United Kingdom but sometimes just when it allows for Self-Deprecation. ("Theres no way I would be happier giving eight hugs a day. Im English! Thats four lifetimes worth of hugs.)

Claire, the British member of Multinational TeamDanger 5, is a virginal Ice Queen. The trope is lampshaded when Claire enters a train compartment with a British Field Marshall, and he complains the compartment is stuffy enough as it is.

A Running Gag with the series' narrator, Sir Phillip Bin, who shrugs off any acknowledgement of his awful youth by saying he ignores it, often via drinking, and that this is "the British way". Curiously, his past self is not usually an example of this, often being very emotive. Except in one instance when his sister is being a Mood-Swinger, which makes Pip declare his desire to "go down to the pub with a crossword and not talk to anyone for a month" in response.

Also played for laughs with Harry Biscuit, after apparently fixing his marriage in series 4, series 5 begins with him and his wife on the outs, which Harry explains is because as an English gentleman, it's taken him fifteen years to process his emotions, and now that he has, he's broken up. Note that Harry is as far from a "typical" English gentleman as it's possible to be.

Also also done when one of Big Bad Mr. Benevolent's schemes is to have British explorers melt the Antarctic, by exposing them to London call girls - their embarrassed awkwardness is what's going to melt the ice.

Theatre

In Anne of the Thousand Days, the French-educated Anne looks down upon Englishmen as barbaric, lacking in culture, and too secretive on the subject of sex.

Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriot's play "No Sex Please, We're British" sums this trope up best. It's fitting that this farce also was turned into an Awful British Sex Comedy later.

Video Games

Mostly averted, especially in beat 'em ups, where the British female characters, including Cammy from Street Fighter, Ivy from the SoulCalibur series, Christie from Dead or Alive and of course Lara Croft, are all easily amongst the most fanservicey. All of them tend to be fairly no-nonsense in demeanor however, and speak with the applicable RP accent, so perhaps not a complete aversion of this trope. However, when it comes to the men, Brits Dudley and Eagle (both Street Fighter) fit the bill perfectly.

Whether or not Miles Edgeworth is an example of this is the subject of much debate in the Ace Attorney fandom. He spent part of his childhood in America and his teen years in Germany, but there's room to suggest he was born British, and his behaviour and speech patterns certainly fit. His voiceover in Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice even has the right accent. Also, he can get quite emotional but usually keeps it under wraps unless it's sheer exasperation.

Subverted in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, where Zero at first seems cold and snarky like this trope, but as time goes on he's shown to be really quite emotional (shown especially in him eventually becoming a Stalker with a Crush in Metal Gear Solid 4 and Peace Walker), and kind of a Cloud Cuckoo Lander. The last part's probably based on the other stereotype of the British sense of humour.

Web Comics

Played quite straight in Scandinavia and the World with its ownMoe Anthropomorphism for England. The problem is, this is also his attitude to his kids, which is pretty much the reason they're so screwed up (America being the boisterous rebel, Canada being the intelligent yet weak "favourite" of sons, Australia the wacky problem child and New Zealand a sheep).

"Fortunately, being English, and therefore utterly repulsed by the slightest sexual urge in myself and everyone around me, I am immune from any callous attempt to touch my heart via my wrinkly undercarriage, and Bayonetta looks about as sexy to me as a pencil stuck through a couple of grapes."

The Flintstones: When Fred Flintstone attempted to pass himself off as uppercrust and well-mannered, he affected a British accent.

One episode of Danny Phantom where the Fentons had the usual stiff British butler.

Owen Burnett, Xanatos' butler on Gargoyles. This was totally on purpose, though, since Puck copied his alter ego from another, equally-wooden, majordomo and just slapped on an accent for better effect.

"I say, open this door at once; we're British!", Sir Jeremy Hodge, The Perils of Penelope, a brilliantly bad example.

Parker, Lady Penelope's driver and manservant may be a subversion. He affects what he may believe is a 'posh' accent, but only indicates his London cockney origins. He's based upon a real man the Thunderbirds production members met running a pub.

Jeff Tracy wears morning dress and affects a British accent to go to an airshow in one episode. 'Oh, bang on; jolly good show!' Wonderfully wrong. Penny is too pleased to correct him.

All the more impressive since Jeff was played by Peter Dyneley, a British actor with a Canadian accent, playing an American trying to affect a stuffy British accent and doing it badly.

Not so bizarre when you consider Thunderbirds was an expensive show to make - Lord Grade, as with so many shows he commissioned, saw first showing in Britain as irrelevant compared with lucrative resale to the USA, and insisted it be made primarily with the American market in mind. Therefore all the action heroes speak with American accents and the British characters were tailored to American expectations - toffs and Dick van Dyke cockneys. The Muppet Show was a later example: the guest star was nearly always an American celebrity, often virtually unknown in Britain.

The "Dapper Crackhead" from The Boondocks: "Sir, Sir! There is no need to be rude! I paid good money for this crack, and it is all burnt up, look!"

Inverted in the 2015 version of Danger Mouse when Danger Mouse meets his American Distaff Counterpart, Jeopardy Mouse. She is much more serious and no-nonsense than he is, which becomes a point of conflict between them. She even points out that he's not a very secretive "secret" agent if he's on a billboard doing a cereal ad.

The image of British stuffiness goes back to the days of Victorian Britain, when many upper and middle class people expressed prudish behaviour. Since the British Empire was so huge many locals across the world witnessed this British prudency and the stereotype stuck.

Even as far back in the 1960s The Beatles' song "I Am The Walrus" (1967) didn't receive airplay on the BBC merely because the word "knickers" was mentioned.

Censor crazy British activists like Mary Whitehouse have also fed this stereotype.

The Video Nasties media scare of the early 1980s is another example. Many Exploitation Film pictures were put on a black list because they supposedly depicted gory violence, rape or extreme sexual imagery. A lot of these pictures were forgettable garbage and not half as offensive as their outrageous titles would suggest. But because of Moral Guardians, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and campaigns by British tabloids to "protect the children" they all got banned anyway.

Oddly enough, Europeans - or at least, the French - also have the impression that the English often are far more lewd in their private life. The French idiom "to spank", for instance, is literally called "Le Vice Anglais" (translation: "The English Vice"). The British, meanwhile, are firmly convinced that the French are all debauched libertines. However, there is some basis for this - many Britons with a dignified, stuffy, chaste, conservative public image are often caught in surprisingly saucy sex scandals. Historical examples are John Profumo,note A British Minister of Defense who was caught committing adultery in 1963 with call girl Christine Keeler. If that weren't bad enough Keeler also had contacts with a well known London gangster and a member of the Soviet embassy. As a result Profumo had to resign. Stephen Milligan note a Conservative politician found dead in 1994, from having auto-erotic asphyxiation sex with his secretary and John Majornote A former British Prime Minister who, in 2002, turned out to have had an extramarital affair with politician Edwina Currie, though this happened way before he even became PM. The amusing thing about this was that Spitting Image had spoofed the ludicrous idea that someone as stuffy as Major would have an extramarital affair in the past. . While British tabloids exploit these stories to death the foreign press is especially interested in them. Not because they are above this sort of thing either, but "because it's those "stuffy Britons" we're talking about."

The whole thing teetered dangerously on the brink of becoming a Dead Horse Trope in September 1997, in the immediate aftermath of the death of Princess Diana. The British population were polarized by her passing. It appeared that one half descended into a crazed grief-frenzy and couldn't stop crying or leaving flowers at any point that had even a tangential relationship with the sainted deceased. The other half, that simply couldn't see what all the fuss was about, retreated into the Stiff Upper Lip as a kind of reaction to all the appalling and unprecedented sentimentality that was going on over the wretched bloody woman, who wasn't even a Royal when she died, so we fail to see what all the fuss is about, do pull yourselves together, for goodness' sake! Abuse and recrimination was freely hurled by both sides. It is perhaps safest to say that while the wall is crumbling, enough of the British people still adhere to the old ways.

This is particularly noteworthy in response to terror attacks - in attacks on Britain, the attitude tends to be stubborn determination of the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' variety, though mixed with grief (see the response to the Manchester Bombing and the way that 'Don't Look Back in Anger' became the slightly wry anthem) and defiance. Attacks on allies, however, (particularly the French) tend to arouse a far greater fury, one that blows this trope apart - see the way that after the Paris Bataclan attacks of 2015 led to an explosion of pure rage from everywhere north of Calais and got Britain off the fence and involved in campaign against ISIS in Syria (which it had previously been reluctant to commit to). This is probably because the former attitude is a 'don't let them see you blink' attitude, while the latter is outrage on behalf of an ally.

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